Max

by Sarah Cohen-Scali

  But I don’t get a chance to try anything. She wakes up with a start, grabs me with surprising intensity, and holds me to her, hard. As if she’d suddenly seen someone who wanted to grab me away from her. Sadly there is no one. Then she unbuttons the jacket of her uniform (dirty, stinking rags) and squeezes me against her breasts. Her skin is clammy with sweat, even though it’s cold in the cellar. She must have a fever from some sort of illness. Jews and Gypsies spread so many diseases; she’s probably got scabies, or leprosy, or typhoid fever, or worse. I can feel her ribs jutting out under her skin. Her chest, like her face, is nothing but an assortment of bones. I realise that she wants me to latch on to her breast.

  At first I’m disgusted. How revolting.

  Then some sort of instinct awakens in me. Something deep in my brain is set off, a kind of signal. I remember the time when the fat cow of a wet nurse tried her best to get me to take her milk. But those memories are so distant. For a few weeks now, they’ve been giving me a bottle in the morning and night, and at lunchtime I eat an excellent puree of carrots or spinach, cooked with produce from the Home’s vegetable garden. So sticking a nipple in my mouth is a backward step: that sort of regression is beneath me. But the fact is I’m hungry. I have no idea if it’s still night-time outside, or if the sun’s come up. How would I have a clue in this pitch-black cellar? Especially as I still sometimes get day and night confused: I’ve been known to wake a nurse up in the middle of the night so she can feed me. Right now, my aching stomach demands that I consume something. So, here goes, I’ll try her breast…Except that she doesn’t have any. Worse still, there are bones instead, bones all over, nothing but bones. What am I supposed to do, huh?

  After a bit, she helps me; she pinches her skin hard and a bit of a nipple emerges that I can get between my lips. But no matter how hard I suck, pull, inhale and bite, nothing comes out. I must have hurt her—I’m getting my first tooth up top—because she cries out and pushes me away roughly. I really thought she was going to hit me. Or throw me against the wall. But she pulls me gently back and starts laughing and crying at the same time, rocking from side to side, cuddling me, to stop my tears. (Here we go: by now I’m so stressed that I yell my head off.)

  She won’t stop repeating the same word in her language. Her barbarian language. (Yiddish? Romany?) It starts with ‘Ma’. Then there’s a strange sound like she’s clicking her tongue against her palate. It sounds like ‘tchetch’ or ‘xetch’.

  ‘Ma-tche-tche…Ma-xetch,’ she repeats, her lips grimacing in a weird smile.

  I can’t quite explain what happens next. The first syllable of this barbarian word, ‘Max’, reverberates in my mind, over and over, producing a sort of echo that rekindles an even more distant memory than that of the fat cow wet nurse. I recall that before her there was another woman who held me in her arms. Who often rocked me, in exactly the same way the prisoner is doing now. And that woman called me ‘Max’.

  I stop yelling right then.

  With all that thinking, my brain whirring, I feel wiped out. No more Draufgängertum. I’m so exhausted I fall asleep.

  We wake up at the same time. What time? No idea. An hour later, a day, two days, perhaps more. It’s hunger that rouses us. I’ve got colic, cramps. And her belly is making all sorts of noises, like water trickling in a cave. I’m terrified again at the thought that she has her meal ready-made: she’ll start eating me now. But she still doesn’t. She takes a bottle of milk out of her jacket pocket. (She must have stolen it from the dormitory before kidnapping me.) She looks at it greedily for a second, then at me. Such a nasty, predatory expression! I can tell from her eyes what she’s thinking: ‘Why should I give you this milk when I’m so hungry?’ And right under my nose she starts drinking, like a glutton—what a nerve. But she only has three or four mouthfuls, no more, and then slides the teat into my mouth.

  I drink and drink, glug, glug, glug.

  It’s so good. Cold, but good. And then it stops. She takes the bottle away even though there’s at least a third left. I start yelling again straightaway. She cuddles me but, instead of calming me, it enrages me. Then, miraculously, she says two words in German. ‘For later!’

  She doesn’t want me to drink it all at once, or I won’t

  have any left. I couldn’t care less! I’m hungry now, NOW!

  She rocks me again, chanting her ‘Max-whatever’ word. I stop crying. This weird-sounding word is like magic. It calms me down…She starts talking, not in her barbarian language, but in German again. Perfect German, no trace of an accent.

  She tells me the story of her life, beginning with the fact that she’s German. (What a relief for me!) I relax and listen. One morning, some months ago, when she was pregnant, she and her husband were arrested by the Gestapo. They were charged with being ‘an insult to racial purity’. (I counted my chickens before they hatched: this woman may be German, but she’s among the people Hitler denounces. She has committed one of the worst crimes possible: she has slept with a Jew! How dreadful!) She says she doesn’t know what happened to her husband, but she was taken to Dachau. When she arrived, she was beaten viciously by an SS soldier who kicked her and bashed her in the belly with a club. Her big baby belly. It made her go into labour on the spot. While she was on the ground in the snow, her face covered in blood, the SS guy screamed at her: ‘Go on, bitch! Get it out! Your Jewish bastard! So we can see what he looks like…Come on! Push! Push!’ She howled. She sobbed. She pushed. And the baby emerged. There, in the bloodied snow. Then the SS guy shot the baby in the head.

  The woman is sobbing, me too. But I don’t know if it’s because of the story or because I’m still hungry.

  She squeezes me to her even tighter. Between hiccups, she says that she wanted to call her baby Maciej. A Polish name, because her husband was Polish.

  Maciej. Maciej. She repeats the name. Over and over. She kisses me.

  I’m not Maciej, I’m not your baby! My name is Konrad, or Max…I’m not sure which anymore…My father is not Jewish! A German woman had intercourse with an SS officer to conceive me. The SS officer could be the one who killed your Maciej!

  If only I could tell her. But I can’t, so she keeps going.

  Maciej. Maciej…Kisses all over me, on my forehead, mouth, hands and feet. At first it annoys me, disgusts me, and then I remember that the woman from ages ago, the one who rocked me like this woman is doing, she used to kiss me, too. And the good thing is that her moist lips warm me up and shield me a bit from the freezing cold in the cellar.

  And the ‘Maciej’ litany helps me to go back to sleep.

  When I wake up I’m soaking. I mean sopping wet. Completely filthy. Piss, shit, the lot. The bad shit, the stuff that nearly got me sent off in the delivery van. What makes things worse is that Magda (that’s her name) didn’t wake up at the same time as me. In fact she dozes off for longer and longer periods. She doesn’t flinch in her sleep anymore either. Her body, still contorted in abnormal positions, stays as still as a corpse. She does manage to become aware of the disaster when she opens one eye…She thought of stealing milk, but not a change of nappies. She looks panic-stricken for a second—not at the stench, which is no worse than her own—but because she sees that my bum is as red as a monkey’s. It’s so itchy, I’m wriggling around like a worm. Even the blanket is drenched. So Magda takes her clothes off. Everything. Her pants are already in shreds so she has no trouble tearing them a bit more to make a nappy that she slides between my legs and ties on the sides. Then she wraps me in her jacket.

  Now I’m wearing a prisoner’s uniform! Things are going from bad to worse. But, after all, no one can see me. No one can hear me either or they’d have come to find me. Has anyone noticed I’m gone? Apparently not. The Home has turned into a factory. One empty bed, so what? At least three others have been filled in the same time.

  Even if I’m wearing a shameful outfit, at least I’m dry. Even if the arms around me are those of a woman who has had sex with a Jew, at least they�
��re keeping me warm; they’re a comfort just like her voice. So soft, so gentle, so close…I can’t hear Hitler’s booming voice here in the cellar. No radio, obviously, and I feel, little by little, his voice getting fainter, a murmur in the distance, far off in my mind, heading towards the section of forgotten things.

  Magda feeds me the rest of the bottle of milk. And after that, over the course of hours, days, nights, I don’t know anymore, she lets me nibble on a crust of stale bread—left over from one of her earlier pilferings, before she kidnapped me. She puts the crumbs in her mouth to moisten them, then into my mouth so I can swallow them without choking.

  The crust of bread is soon finished. And an apple core, a few scraps of meat on some old chicken bones, and some potato and beetroot peelings.

  Then there’s nothing more. Nothing.

  Hunger. Cold. Lethargy.

  Magda starts talking again. She tells me about Maciej. How she loved him when he was in her belly. How she would have liked to see him grow up.

  Maciej. Maciej.

  When I shut my eyes for too long, Magda shakes me gently until I open them again. She’s frightened I’ll die in my sleep. And I’m the same about her. I manage to squirm a bit and get my hand or foot into her face and wake her up. That’s what the last of my Draufgängertum is good for. I know I’m bound to her. If she dies, that’s the end of me, too.

  And that’s when the penny drops again. Because I’m sleeping in Magda’s arms, and not lying on my stomach as instructed by that other fellow, the one who’s above us somewhere, the Herr Doktor with the eyes like beads of ice—what’s his name again?—I think my skull has changed shape. As it’s no longer dolichocephalic, no longer as long and oval-shaped, distant memories have resurfaced. All of a sudden I remember ‘the magic cord’ that worked with the woman who breastfed me so long ago. That woman was…my mother…Yes, it was Mutti. ‘Mummy’. The word I erased from my vocabulary.

  Mutti. Magda says it to me every time she manages to wake up. Mama ist da. Habe keine angst. Mummy is here. Don’t be scared.

  But the magic cord doesn’t work for long. After the hours, days, nights spent in the cellar, it stops functioning. When I pull on it, the response takes longer and longer to arrive. Until there’s no response at all. Until I no longer have the strength to pull. This time it really is the end of my Draufgängertum.

  I shut my eyes and let myself go. After hours, days, nights in this cellar, those arms close over me. Cold. Stiff as hooks.

  Apparently they had to break the bones in the hands and arms of the corpse holding me captive.

  I spent five days in the cellar, two of them with the corpse. They thought I was dead when they found me. I no longer resembled a baby of the master race. Filthy, drenched in my own piss, shit and vomit, emaciated, I was scarcely bigger than the rats, which had started to nibble on my meagre flesh.

  As I had suspected, my disappearance went completely unnoticed. When she found my bed empty in the early hours of the morning, the nurse on duty didn’t tell a soul. Unable to provide an explanation—how could a sleeping baby vanish like that?—and dreading a severe punishment if her unpardonable negligence were discovered, she bribed a secretary to fake an adoption dossier in my name. When Josefa returned from a tour of inspection of another Home, she learned that Konrad the daredevil, Konrad whom no one until then had wanted to adopt, had finally found a family. She swallowed the story hook, line and sinker, thrilled by this wonderful news.

  The gardener raised the alarm. One morning the chap noticed that one of the flowerbeds he was so proud of had been vandalised. At first they thought it was an act of sabotage committed by one of the prisoners on gardening duty. When they couldn’t find the guilty party among them, they ‘relocated’ the whole lot. The gardener started to repair the damage, digging over the mound of earth to plant new seeds, and discovered the opening to a dried-up well. Deep in the hole, on the wall, were some stairs. He reported his discovery immediately and they called in some backup. Down in the well, they followed a long section of an underground passage leading to the entrance of a cellar that had not been marked on the plans of the building when it was an asylum.

  A scandal erupted.

  Sound the alarm. Action stations. An inquiry. Reprisals. Immediate ‘relocation’ of the nurse and her accomplice. The architect who had renovated the Home was deported to a camp. As for the prisoner’s corpse, it was hung on display at the tradesmen’s entrance for several days, as an example, until the crows finished it off.

  Then Doctor Ebner had to decide my fate. What should he do with the carcass I’d turned into? The delivery van? Given the pitiful state I’d been reduced to, I didn’t even come close to a decent ‘rabbit’. I’d die in transit before I got to a ‘scientific institute’.

  That left the incinerator.

  What a waste! Reduced to ashes. Ebner couldn’t bring himself to let that happen to the child he personally had brought into the world, the firstborn in the Lebensborn program, who had had the honour of being baptised by the Führer himself. It would have been sacrilege. He decided to keep me in his laboratory as a study specimen for his own research. Due to the prolonged starvation I’d suffered, I had severe dehydration. I’d lost fifteen per cent of my body weight, so my blood pressure might drop at any moment and bring on ‘hypovolemic shock’ (a medical term meaning that’d be the end of me).

  Doctor Ebner was curious. As a young representative of the Aryan race, how exactly would I resist such an imminent prospect of death? How long could I endure such agony? The answers to these questions would provide precious data for the future of science. The Herr Doktor rallied himself and—in the record book that had been set up at my birth—he documented a meticulous account of my ordeal.

  My eyes were sunken in their sockets; my skin was cold and mottled; I had ‘glossitis’, another medical term, meaning my tongue was swollen, parched, red and covered in a yellow coating. I was tormented by a terrible, unquenchable thirst. When Doctor Ebner pinched the skin on my abdomen, it stayed shrivelled.

  To top it all off, I could no longer piss.

  Doctor Ebner carried out emergency rehydration: an intravenous saline solution. It might have been good medical treatment, but it did nothing to stop my raging thirst. All I wanted was something to suck—for my mouth, which felt like cardboard, and my poor little chapped lips, which felt like sandpaper. I would have drunk anything. But no matter how much I screamed no one got the message.

  I was also suffering from tachycardia and recurring episodes of altered consciousness, accompanied by delirium. What horrific, unremitting visions I had! First there was the vision of the breast I was so desperate for: it appeared as in a hallucination, full of the promise of milk I craved. I was overjoyed. But no sooner had I latched on to it than it began to swell up, and swell up into something monstrous—suffocating me until it had crushed me like a fly under a boot.

  Then there were the times I could see myself inside my mother’s belly, peaceful in my warm, watery sack, when all of a sudden there was a terrible jolting that became more and more violent and the sack tore open. No more shelter, no more protection. It was like a cataclysm, as if giants were stomping on the belly while I was inside it. I was pushed forward. Pushed. Pushed. I heard yelling, cursing: Bastard! Jew! I was so scared I tried to go backwards, but it was impossible. I could just see some light, white light, blinding, cold light, when…bang!

  A gunshot. And my skull exploded.

  To compound my torment, Doctor Ebner needed to take blood samples every four hours and urine samples every six hours for his tests. He weighed me eight times a day and checked my temperature. He listened to my lungs, took X-rays to measure the size of my liver. He measured the perimeter of my skull and checked for signs of fitting.

  My martyrdom lasted three days and three nights.

  Until this morning, when my fever broke, my skin returned to normal, as well as my tongue. I had started to put on weight.

  Ebner, who hadn’t
left my bedside, was studying me even more intently, filling in his notes, charts, statistics. I was in remission. Now they had to see if I could take being rehydrated orally. I drank from a bottle. Finally, water—lots of water. Then, bit by bit, some milk. I began to pee, to poo. Tiny little turds at first, like goat’s shit, then nice big, firm turds.

  Twenty-four hours passed. Forty-eight. My temperature remained stable. My weight continued to increase. Ebner listened, pinched, palpated. He kept me under observation: no more skinfold calliper, no more diarrhoea, no more vomiting.

  It wasn’t remission; it was recovery, total recovery. A real miracle. No, it wasn’t a miracle: the exultant Ebner had before him, in the shape of my little convalescing body, the tangible proof that the Aryan race could resist sicknesses that would destroy lesser races.

  I was indeed a true member of the master race.

  After recovery, came convalescence and re-education, in the literal sense of the word. This was left up to Josefa, who felt responsible for my misfortunes. Even though she wasn’t one of the vast numbers of staff ‘relocated’ after I was found half-dead, her sense of duty had nonetheless driven her to admit her share of guilt and to offer up her resignation. How had she let herself be duped by one of her underlings? It was unforgivable.